Though Adversaries, Auto Talk Leaders Have Much in Common

Published: September 17, 2007

Ron Gettelfinger, the president of the United Automobile Workers union, and Rick Wagoner, the chief executive of General Motors, may seem to be at opposite ends of the automotive spectrum.

But as the union and the company tried to reach agreement on a new contract over the weekend and avoid a strike, some notable similarities between the men became apparent.

Both are running institutions that once dominated the American automobile industry but have been diminished as Japanese companies have made deep inroads here. Both have devoted their careers to the organizations they run. Each generally displays a steady exterior but can show flashes of temper when events do not go his way.

Most important, both Mr. Gettelfinger and Mr. Wagoner have everything on the line in negotiations that continued Sunday at a U.A.W.-G.M. education center in Detroit. Contracts covering 73,000 workers expired at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time on Saturday.

''The very survival of these institutions is now at risk,'' said John Casesa, an industry analyst with the Casesa Shapiro Group.

The weight of the industry is on the shoulders of G.M., as the lead negotiator with the union. The U.A.W. has not been in formal contact with officials at Ford Motor or Chrysler since selecting G.M. as its strike target on Thursday.

At the time, it told executives there that it planned to resume talks this Wednesday, assuming a deal had been reached at G.M., a person with knowledge of the conversation said Sunday. Those talks would be delayed, however, if discussions with G.M. dragged on, or if there was a strike, this person said. While Mr. Wagoner has been on hand during the talks, he has not played a day-to-day role in the bargaining at G.M., where contracts have been extended hour to hour.

Traditionally, chief executives receive regular reports on the progress of their team, which in Mr. Wagoner's case includes the company's chief financial officer, Frederick A. Henderson; its president for North America, Troy Clarke; and its vice president for North American labor relations, Diana D. Tremblay, the first woman to play so prominent a role in negotiations.

Mr. Gettelfinger has his own team, led by Cal Rapson, the union's president for the G.M. department, who previously served as a regional director with responsibilities that included plants in Flint, Mich.

He is also getting advice from a retired union official, Frank Musick, who was close to Mr. Gettelfinger's predecessor, the late Stephen P. Yokich.

Like Mr. Yokich, Mr. Gettelfinger has played his cards extremely close, keeping a lid on information from the talks taking place inside what some U.A.W. officials have nicknamed ''the fortress.''

Industry leaders, including Mr. Wagoner; Ford Motor's chief executive, Alan R. Mulally; and Robert L. Nardelli, the new head of Chrysler, held a conference call on Saturday to discuss the negotiations.

Mr. Gettelfinger, who came up through the ranks at Ford, has departed from Mr. Yokich in one major way.

While Mr. Yokich successfully fought off the companies' efforts to erode gains made by the union since World War II, Mr. Gettelfinger's tenure has been marked by a series of concessions to the carmakers.

They have included the deals with G.M. and Ford that required workers and retirees to pay more for health care coverage; lower wages at the bankrupt Delphi Corporation, a parts supplier once owned by G.M.; and retirement incentives and buyout deals offered to workers at the three Detroit automakers and Delphi over the last year.

More than 80,000 workers opted for those arrangements, leaving Mr. Gettelfinger with a total work force at the Detroit companies of just fewer than 200,000 workers, or a fifth the number who worked at car plants in 1980.

Local union officials, for their part, say they understand the pressure faced by Mr. Gettelfinger. ''Yokich was a different kind of president in a different time,'' said Debbie Kirchner, the recording secretary for U.A.W. Local 598 in Flint, founded after a historic sit-down strike in 1937.

''I stand by Gettelfinger,'' said Sylvia West, who has worked at G.M.'s truck plant in Flint for three years. Standing outside the union hall, where dozens of workers were gathering for a membership meeting, Ms. West added, ''I don't want a strike, but if he says we should, I'm behind him 100 percent.''

Barring that, any deal Mr. Gettelfinger reaches is bound to look much different from the contracts union members have become accustomed to approving.

If Mr. Wagoner gets his way, G.M. will shift its $55 billion liability for worker and retiree health care to the union, which would run a giant trust called a voluntary employee benefit association.

Mr. Wagoner has pushed for the trust in an effort to jump-start the competitiveness of G.M. in North America, where it continues to lose money even as its operations around the world flourish.

''By putting our global resources together, it really shows what a global G.M. team can accomplish,'' Mr. Wagoner told the radio host Paul W. Smith at the Frankfurt Motor Show last week.

But G.M.'s foreign gains will mean little, Mr. Casesa said, if Mr. Wagoner does not address his biggest problems at home. Likewise, Mr. Gettelfinger must prepare his members for a future far different from the one they thought awaited them, he said.

''G.M. is running out of capital, the U.A.W. is running out of members,'' Mr. Casesa said. ''The only solution for them both is to embrace radical change.''